by Abby Way

Created on: June 14, 2009

The Windows registry is not well known, but causes hassles to a surprising number of people. It's often forgotten about when it comes to system maintenance, much to the user's dismay when he or she sees that the computer has not sped up as much as they'd hoped.

WHAT IS THE WINDOWS REGISTRY?
The Windows registry can be compared to a phone book. It keeps track of important information about everything related to your system. Hardware configurations, software settings, and user profiles are some examples of information that the registry handles.

Daily computer usage clutters up your Windows registry gradually. After you've been using your computer for a while, you might start getting odd errors and noticing the computer slowing down a lot, particularly during startup.

This is because Windows is trying to load everything that is listed in the registry, yet does not actually exist anymore, like software settings from programs that no longer exist and hardware configurations of old equipment that you no longer use. It's like Windows is trying to locate numbers in a phone book with no organization.

Fragmentation isn't limited to your hard drive, either. Your registry will get fragmented, just like the hard drive does, so Windows also has to try and find each page of that phone book and put them in order before using it!

You can see why the registry can cause so many errors and so much lag during startup. Luckily, there are ways you can restore your registry to an almost-new state!

HOW TO FIX THE REGISTRY
A registry cleaner will fix your Windows registry by deleting old entries and fixing outdated ones so that Windows isn't trying to find nonexistent files anymore.

A free registry cleaner will do an adequate job, however, a paid one is usually better. RegistryBooster is one example of a reliable registry cleaner. The current version will only let you fix 15 errors with the free version, however, you can see how many errors would be fixed with the paid version. If you can't find a registry cleaner for free, a small investment in a piece of software like this one is well worth the money.

The first precaution you want to take when fixing the registry is backing up the registry in case something goes wrong while it's fixing the paths. Almost all registry cleaners will do this for you, or at least tell you exactly how to do this.

The registry cleaner will automatically fix up to thousands of entries that are incorrect, depending on the age and to-date usage of your computer.


Once your registry is clean, you will probably notice a faster startup and better performance. Remember to schedule a registry scan for your machine on a regular basis so that you won't be affected by an error-laden registry again!

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